With over 1 billion active users daily, Instagram has a lot of untapped potential, particularly when it comes to hosting contests for Instagram.
Creating a worthwhile Instagram contest can help you increase interaction, followers, and, yes, sales for your brand. With Instagram contests becoming more popular, you have an audience both familiar with and interested in your Instagram contest.
In this post, we’ll go through several simple contests you can use to boost your Instagram marketing strategy.
What Is An Instagram Contest?
Instagram accounts that run contests can build their following up by up to 70% quicker than accounts that don’t run contests. They’re powerful tactics for reaching new audiences and encouraging engagement. But what exactly are they, and how do they work?
Instagram contests are giveaways or contests sponsored by brands or social media influencers. The goal of most of the content, giveaways, and challenges in these contests is to raise brand or influencer recognition and, as a result, boost Instagram growth that leads to a larger following or increased interaction.
Instagram contests will often increase your post engagement, bringing you many benefits for the Instagram algorithm. Your content may rank higher in hashtag searches due to its success, allowing new people to discover your material. If your audience isn’t usually responsive to your regular posts but engages with a contest post, this can help push your regular content to the top of their feeds for some time.
With the right strategy, you’ll reach thousands of potential new followers while strengthening your brand’s sense of community. You’ll also increase account engagement, nurture your existing audience, and get more traffic to your assets like your posts, shop, affiliate links, sales pages, and more.
How To Run An Instagram Contest
Running Instagram contests is about creating well-planned, intentional giveaways that attract your audience. You’ll want people who intend to stick around to engage with your content. That’s why before starting a contest, understand what your goals are. Be clear with what you want to achieve. Ask yourself:
- Do I want to grow following?
- Do I want to boost brand awareness?
- Do I want to give back to my community?
- Do I want to promote a product?
- Do I want to raise awareness of a particular social issue?
Also, think about the target audience you’re trying to reach. What kinds of posts do they enjoy posting on their feeds? What types of posts do they like seeing? Drumming up engagement involves focusing your goals on the kind of content your audience likes posting and engaging with.
You’ll be able to fine-tune your campaign efforts if you have a crystal clear view of your goals. Once you’ve established your goals, you’re ready to create and run your Instagram contest. To help you get started, we’ve put together a complete list of steps to follow when organizing and running an engaging Instagram contest. We’ve covered all the essentials you need to know!
Decide The Rules
Contests are pretty simple to run on Instagram. However, the statement of release is a crucial regulation to follow that most people are unaware of.
As you may have noticed, most Instagram contests or giveaways come with an exceptionally long caption with a lot of fine print. This is because Instagram has some rules and guidelines to ensure they’re not held liable if one of the parties doesn’t keep their half of the bargain.
Here’s a quick rundown of the key points from Instagram’s contest rules or promotional guidelines:
- Acknowledge that your Instagram contest or giveaway is not affiliated, sponsored, promoted, or run by Instagram
- Include the name of the company running the Instagram contest or giveaway.
- Include the campaign’s start and end dates and the time zone.
- Include constraints on participation, such as age and locality.
What People Need To Do To Enter
Next, decide on how users will join or enter the contest. Some common ways to enter contests for Instagram are:
- like the post
- follow your account
- mention one or two other users in the comment section
- post something with a hashtag
- go to your website
The priority is to make participation simple for users, keeping the entry requirements to three or four steps.
Determine A Prize
The prize for your Instagram contest should be something relevant to your company or brand. Don’t give away an iPhone just to entice people to come; it won’t bring good, excellent people who will help your business. Choose a prize that’s valuable enough to warrant the level of participation. You’ll receive more participation and participants if the prize is more valuable.
Asking consumers to snap a photo with your product or execute an action and upload it to their profile, for example, is a huge “ask” that deserves a bigger prize. Asking someone to like a post and tag a friend in the comments, on the other hand, is a little request that should be rewarded with a low-value award.
Consider your target audience, budgetary limitations, and how aggressive your goals are when deciding what the award for your contest should be.
How & When You Will Announce The Winner
In hosting contests for Instagram, having a fair and objective process in place is essential. You need to decide on how winners will be chosen. Will you use a random generator tool or invite judges to screen entries? Then, after selecting the winner, you can notify them either through a public Instagram campaign post. Just be sure you’ve notified the winners privately first before publicly announcing their win on the platform.
5 Easy Contests For Instagram
There are a lot of ways to approach contests for Instagram. Here are five different options you can draw inspiration from to give you some context.
1. Tag To Win Instagram Contest
The tag-to-win contest concept is simple and effective. All you’re asking is that people tag a friend in the comments section so that they, too, can enter the contest and be eligible to win the prize.
This contest format is excellent for increasing the organic reach of your profile because people will almost certainly receive a notification if they are tagged by someone. These people will then look at your profile and possibly follow you. They may also tag other people. This will result in a viral feedback loop, attracting more participants to the competition.
In addition to tagging someone, you can ask people to follow your account to increase the impact of this feedback loop.
2. Branded Hashtag Instagram Contest
While trending instagram hashtags are great, branded hashtags help increase brand awareness. An Instagram hashtag contest is one of the most straightforward ways to get fans to interact with your brand. In this type of contest, a person posts their picture on Instagram and then tags it with the hashtag created specifically for the contest.
All photos uploaded with that hashtag are then displayed on a gallery page on your website or Facebook Page and in a single Instagram stream.
This type of contest allows you to strengthen your emotional connection with your followers. You get them to talk about your company to their networks while collecting user-generated content for future social media marketing efforts.
3. Repost To Win Instagram Contest
When someone reposts a post or shares it on their stories, Instagram notifies you. It’s a clever way to run an Instagram giveaway. Make a contest post and encourage your followers to share it on their stories.
It’s extremely simple to keep track of entries and select a winner. More importantly, it ensures that your post is widely shared. This increases the number of people who see your contest and, as a result, your page.
4. Caption This Instagram Contest
A caption contest is one in which you ask people to caption a photograph you’ve uploaded. You can either choose the best caption on your own or tell others to like the best caption. The caption with the most likes wins.
While the second option can be an excellent way to engage your audience, the first option can help prevent people from inflating their likes artificially.
5. Selfie Instagram Contest
Because Instagram is undoubtedly the home of selfies, this type of contest is a perfect fit for the platform. It’s a contest that works incredibly well with products.
With a selfie contest, you ask people to post a picture of themselves using your product or with the product in the background. This contest format is particularly beneficial to a business because it demonstrates how a product can be used to potential customers. It’s a fantastic example of user-generated content.
Create a unique hashtag when writing the description for a selfie contest and then ask people to use this hashtag whenever they post their photos. By searching for the hashtag on Instagram, you can find the pictures people have uploaded for this contest.
User-generated content can be a valuable source of social proof. You can repost the content generated by the contest long after the contest has ended.
A Goldmine For Instagram
Contests for Instagram are a goldmine for driving engagement thanks to a slew of audience-building benefits. Brands of all sizes use these contests and giveaways to increase visibility, drive social shares, and raise brand awareness.
